Rick Riordan - The Red Pyramid

“Let’s keep looking,” I said.

After a few more minutes, I found a picture of some of animal-headed gods, five in a row, with a starry woman figure arching over them protectively like an umbrella. Dad had released five gods. Hmm.

“Carter,” I called. “What’s this, then?”

He came to have a look and his eyes lit up.

“That’s it!” he announced. “These five…and up here, their mother, Nut.”

I laughed. “A goddess named Nut? Is her last name Case?”

“Very funny,” Carter said. “She was the goddess of the sky.”

He pointed to the painted ceiling-the lady with the blue star-spangled skin, same as in the scroll.

“So what about her?” I asked.

Carter knit his eyebrows. “Something about the Demon Days. It had to do with the birth of these five gods, but it’s been a long time since Dad told me the story. This whole scroll is written in hieratic, I think. That’s like hieroglyph cursive. Can you read it?”

I shook my head. Apparently, my particular brand of insanity only applied to regular hieroglyphs.

“I wish I could find the story in English,” Carter said.

Just then there was a cracking noise behind us. The empty-handed clay statue hopped off his pedestal and marched towards us. Carter and I scrambled to get out of his way, but he walked straight past us, grabbed a cylinder from its cubbyhole and brought it to Carter.

“It’s a retrieval shabti,” I said. “A clay librarian!”

Carter swallowed nervously and took the cylinder. “Um…thanks.”

The statue marched back to his pedestal, jumped on, and hardened again into regular clay.

“I wonder…” I faced the shabti. “Sandwich and chips, please!”

Sadly, none of the statues jumped down to serve me. Perhaps food wasn’t allowed in the library.

Carter uncapped the cylinder and unrolled the papyrus. He sighed with relief. “This version is in English.”

As he scanned the text, his frown got deeper.

“You don’t look happy,” I noticed.

“Because I remember the story now. The five gods…if Dad really released them, it isn’t good news.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Start from the beginning.”

Carter took a shaky breath. “Okay. So the sky goddess, Nut, was married to the earth god, Geb.”

“That would be this chap on the floor?” I tapped my foot on the big green man with the river and hills and forests all over his body.

“Right,” Carter said. “Anyway, Geb and Nut wanted to have kids, but the king of the gods, Ra-he was the sun god-heard this bad prophecy that a child of Nut-”

“Child of Nut,” I snickered. “Sorry, go on.”

“-a child of Geb and Nut would one day replace Ra as king. So when Ra learned that Nut was pregnant, Ra freaked out. He forbade Nut to give birth to her children on any day or night of the year.”

I crossed my arms. “So what, she had to stay pregnant forever? That’s awfully mean.”

Carter shook his head. “Nut figured out a way. She set up a game of dice with the moon god, Khons. Every time Khons lost, he had to give Nut some of his moonlight. He lost so many times, Nut won enough moonlight to create five new days and tag them on to the end of the year.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “First, how can you gamble moonlight? And if you did, how could you make extra days out of it?”

“It’s a story!” Carter protested. “Anyway, the Egyptian calendar had three hundred and sixty days in the year, just like the three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle. Nut created five days and added them to the end of the year-days that were not part of the regular year.”

“The Demon Days,” I guessed. “So the myth explains why a year has three hundred and sixty-five days. And I suppose she had her children-”

“During those five days,” Carter agreed. “One kid per day.”

“Again, how do you have five children in a row, each on a different day?”

“They’re gods,” Carter said. “They can do stuff like that.”

“Makes as much sense as the name Nut. But please, go on.”

“So when Ra found out, he was furious, but it was too late. The children were already born. Their names were Osiris-”

“The one Dad was after.”

“Then Horus, Set, Isis, and, um…” Carter consulted his scroll. “Nephthys. I always forget that one.”

“And the fiery man in the museum said, you have released all five.”

“Exactly. What if they were imprisoned together and Dad didn’t realize it? They were born together, so maybe they had to be summoned back into the world together. The thing is, one of these guys, Set, was a really bad dude. Like, the villain of Egyptian mythology. The god of evil and chaos and desert storms.”

I shivered. “Did he perhaps have something to do with fire?”

Carter pointed to one of the figures in the picture. The god had an animal head, but I couldn’t quite make out which sort of animal: Dog? Anteater? Evil bunny rabbit? Whichever it was, his hair and his clothes were bright red.

“The Red Lord,” I said.

“Sadie, there’s more,” Carter said. “Those five days-the Demon Days-were bad luck in Ancient Egypt. You had to be careful, wear good luck charms, and not do anything important or dangerous on those days. And in the British Museum, Dad told Set: They’ll stop you before the Demon Days are over.”

“Surely you don’t think he meant us,” I said. “We’re supposed to stop this Set character?”

Carter nodded. “And if the last five days of our calendar year still count as the Egyptian Demon Days-they’d start on December 27, the day after tomorrow.”

The shabti seemed to be staring at me expectantly, but I had not the slightest idea what to do. Demon Days and evil bunny gods-if I heard one more impossible thing, my head would explode.

And the worst of it? The little insistent voice in the back of my head saying: It’s not impossible. To save Dad, we must defeat Set.

As if that had been on my to-do list for Christmas hols. See Dad-check. Develop strange powers-check. Defeat an evil god of chaos-check. The whole idea was mad!

Suddenly there was a loud crash, as if something had broken in the Great Room. Khufu began barking in alarm.

Carter and I locked eyes. Then we ran for the stairs.

S A D I E

OUR BABOON WAS GOING completely sky goddess-which is to say, nuts.

He swung from column to column, bouncing along the balconies, overturning pots and statues. Then he ran back to the terrace windows, stared outside for a moment, and proceeded to go berserk again.

Muffin was also at the window. She crouched on all fours with her tail twitching as if she were stalking a bird.

“Perhaps it’s just a passing flamingo,” I suggested hopefully, but I’m not sure Carter could hear me over the screaming baboon.

We ran to the glass doors. At first I didn’t see any problem. Then water exploded from the pool, and my heart nearly jumped out of my chest. Two enormous creatures, most definitely not flamingos, were thrashing about with our crocodile, Philip of Macedonia.

I couldn’t make out what they were, only that they were fighting Philip two against one. They disappeared under the boiling water, and Khufu ran screaming through the Great Room again, bonking himself on the head with his empty Cheerios box, which I must say was not particularly helpful.

“Longnecks,” Carter said incredulously. “Sadie, did you see those things?”

I couldn’t find an answer. Then one of the creatures was thrown out of the pool. It slammed into the doors right in front of us, and I jumped back in alarm. On the other side of the glass was the most terrifying animal I’d ever seen. Its body was like a leopard’s-lean and sinewy, with golden spotted fur-but its neck was completely wrong. It was green and scaly and at least as long as the rest of its body. It had a cat’s head, but no normal cat’s. When it turned its glowing red eyes towards us, it howled, showing a forked tongue and fangs dripping with green venom.